I’ve been doing animations at 25 frames per second. However, I would like to be able to eventually put them on DVDs to play on a television. My primary concern is to get them to work in the United States, but I would like to get DVDs to work in other countries as well. I recently read that the NTSC format used in the United States works at 29.97 frames per second. Do I need to adjust my animations to make them run at 29.97 frames per second, or will they still work on DVDs in the United States with 25 frames per second?
Best to match the frame rate so you don’t have off speed playback. You may have to adjust the speed of animation actions or keyframes.
One of the problems is that while the United States uses a format that runs at 29.97 frames per second, most of Europe and Australia use a format that run at 25 frames per second, so whatever rate I choose it will not be ideal for some regions. From what I’ve read on the Internet, it sounds like it is possible to convert from one frame rate to another, but I don’t know exactly how it is done. If I converted from 25 fps to (approximately) 30 fps, would it mean that every five frames would be repeated? Would the audience notice this?
Yes they would. You can use the vse speed effect to see for yourself.
Well for 25fps I don’t know but for 24fps its quite common to do convertions to pal and ntsc (cinema to DVD release)
For pal you would normaly speed up the video and correct the pitch by 0.7 of a semitone
For ntsc you would use a telecine pull down (also known as Three-two pull down). Its normaly an encoder feature that you have to actvate.
I couldn’t quite understand everything at Wikipedia. It seems like there must be a way to convert between PAL and NTSC since it would then not be possible to distribute films worldwide. However, it seems to me that the only way to do this would be to repeat frames (to increase the frame rate) or merge frames (to decrease the frame rate). I don’t know if this would look weird to the audience or if a single frame goes by quick enough without the audience knowing. Does it look weird when European or Australian films are shown on North American television, or vice versa? I am wondering if I should just keep my animations at 25 fps and conform to PAL settings, and then convert to NTSC later.
Films are shot at 24fps PAL is 25fps and NTSC is (aprox) 30fps.
So it’s easy to just alter speed for PAL (and pitch down audio to match). In NTSC countries the perform Pull Down
its the standard telecine method of transferring film to NTSC video. The film is slowed by 0.1 percent (a factor of 1000/1001) from 24 fps to 23.98 fps, and then each film frame is transferred to interlaced video in a repeating 2:3:2:3 field pattern.
from FCP7 guide http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/index.html#chapter=E%26section=2%26tasks=true
Thus it is progressive.
But most standards transfers end up simply duplicating frames. Repeating the last PAL frame 5 more times (aprox). This is a substantial pause in motion.
Yes the results are poor, unless you use morphing (or motion estimation) technology as even the alternative frame blending tends to look odd.
Choose to deliver on the format most people will view it on. If PAL then choose PAL. If international then choose… the internet 